Historic flooding along the Mississippi River gives me an excuse to show another of my favorite maps, from Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. Each color represents an old channel, dating back 1,000 years or so. Those that correspond to historical records are dated, while older channels are ordered according […]
Last week, Jessica Ball of the American Geophysical Union’s Magma Cum Laude blog pointed out this map of natural hazards in the U.S., published by the New York Times: The map has many of the design virtues common in graphics from the Times (clean, focused on the data, clearly labeled, small multiples), but when I […]
We at the Meteoroid Environment Office are hoping that you have clear skies on May 5/6 when we have the opportunity to see pieces of Comet Halley whiz through Earth’s atmosphere!Image of an Eta Aquarid meteor, taken the night of May 3, 2011. (NASA/MSFC)Comet Halley (NASA)Depending on your age, you may remember 25 years ago …
May 3, 2011 When thrown properly, a boomerang will always come back to the thrower. (When thrown improperly, it ends up over the neighbor’s fence where a dog chews on it, and you don’t get your boomerang back, but that is another story for another day.) This afternoon, Matt and I enjoyed what is known […]
May 2, 2011 We have completed most of our preparations and are ready for our flight to Swiss Camp tomorrow. Today was spent tracking down our final cargo items and getting every to fit into boxes and bags – a trip to the cargo warehouse, a run to the airport to load a plane, back […]
May 1, 2011 Greetings from Greenland! Matt and I have had a relatively uneventful day and are now situated in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland. After our unscheduled stop in Goose Bay last night, we boarded a flight for Greenland late this morning. After the requisite passport check, we were free to get situated and start the next […]
April 30, 2011 Greetings from Greenland Canada! Tom Neumann and I are en route to Greenland’s ice sheet for about two weeks of field work. Yesterday morning we flew from warm and sunny Maryland to Schenectady, New York, where we stocked up on food. This morning we got up at 4:30am in order to catch a ride […]
One of the best things about international travel (at least to a geek like me) is to see how different cultures approach design and signage. Here’s a few from Blue Mountains National Park, near Sydney, Australia.
MABEL: Flying on a high-altitude aircraft at the brink of space, the MABEL instrument is helping scientists to simulate measurements from NASA’s next ice-observing satellite, ICESat-2. April 8, 2011 Today, I caught this video on the NASAexplorer channel on YouTube: It covers Jake Bleacher’s work in understanding lava-sheet inflation (see his video, which covers this interesting […]
